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"Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven: Porphyro grew faint:

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint."

Apart from all its sweetness and beauty, there is in the poem the rarest vividness of painting. The description. of Madeline, "by the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd," is like a draught of mandragora. You may hear the floor creak as Porphyro steals out to set his charmed table; may see in the dim twilight of the chamber that gorgeous "cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet." The candied fruits, the jellies "soother than the creamy curd," the "lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon, the manna, dates, and spiced dainties, every onc," heaped in their golden dishes and baskets bright, are as appetizing as a confectioner's bow-window. In fancy you may smell the clean lavender-scented linen that lines the "soft and chilly nest" of Madeline; may mark the very coverlet rise and fall with her gentle breath. And when at last the poet breaks the enchantment, and tells you that these lovers fled away into the night and storm ages ago; that Angela the old is dead; that the Beadsman has told his thousand Aves, and gone to Paradise, it is like waking from a vivid dream that still haunts the broad, wakeful sunshine.

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All of worth in the present has its archetype in the past. Thus it is in poetry. Wordsworth, grave, reverent, and oracular, is moulded after the ancient Scalds, whose province it was to instruct and inform, as well as to entertain, by their song. Keats, on the other hand, like the merry minstrels, who in their song had no higher

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purpose than to soothe and delight, came not into the world to teach, but to charm. In a brief, sweet springtide the joys of all his life were said and sung; all his yearning passion-songs, his "lays of love and longing," sweet with the breath of violets and the warble of pairing birds, warm with the ardent kisses of the sun, wild with the turbulence of brimming rills, and fair with dewy greenery and virgin bloom. To him there came no affluent summer-time, no mellow autumn with its ripened fruitage; for in his young May-time he

"Wept away this life of care

Which we have borne, and yet must bear."

"In these bad days," says the author of "Obiter Dicta," it is thought more educationally useful to know the principles of the common pump than Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn."" In view of this state of things, it surely behooves us, in the cause of that admirable poem, to take sides with the "Urn" against the "Pump." We cannot afford to pander to a too material age by letting any pure poetry pass into nothingness. Let us therefore come promptly to the rescue, and boldly - if somewhat rashly assert with Keats in that matchless ode that

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

EV

CHAPTER XXI.

SHELLEY.

VERY incident in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley wears a romantic interest. Born at Sussex, Aug. 4, 1792, the son and heir of a wealthy English baronet, Destiny gave him from the cradle that "world's gear" which she has too often withheld from the tuneful souls; yet sad and strange was his brief, troubled existence. Sorrow and he seem to have so early met as to have been playfellows; for he tells us that when a mere lad at school he walked forth upon the glittering grass, in the fresh May-dawn, weeping, he knew not why. At Oxford he studied hard but irregularly, made chemical experiments for diversion, and ever through all, thought and speculated, till thought became misery, and speculation mere midsummer madness.

At seventeen, glowing with youthful ardor, and loving with a martyr's passion what he mistook for truth, Shelley foolishly challenged the authorities of Oxford to deny in public controversy his unanswerable arguments for atheism. The most sage authorities not only properly refused to measure swords with so bold an enthusiast, but in the same spirit of dogmatical intolerance that a few centuries earlier might have consigned him to the stake, hastened to expel him with opprobrium, as an atheist, from the university.

The friends of the rash, misguided boy turned from him in disgust; and he seems upon the whole to have met from the world that very treatment which of all others was most calculated to nourish the very evil it professed to

cure.

Infidel by intellect, but Christian by the tendencies of his heart, God knows how different Shelley's after-life might have been had the lines fallen to him in more liberal places, where his doubts and difficulties had been met with the kindness and tolerance born of broader theological perception and that divine charity too often ignored by blind and over-zealous religionists. Fragile in health and frame, organically sceptical, metaphysical to a degree next to insanity, and continually poring over unwholesome French philosophy, his brain had suspended all healthy action; and for the time being he should have been treated for incipient lunacy rather than reviled for infidelity. Who that reads "Queen Mab" can doubt it?

Shortly after his expulsion from college Shelley married a beautiful girl for whom he seems at the time to have had a kind of school-boy attachment as unstable as it was illjudged. Harriet Westbrooke was the daughter of a retired coffee-house keeper; and proud Sir Timothy Shelley never forgave his infidel son this insult to the ancestral dignity. Such flagrant disloyalty to his patrician creed, overlapping his retrograde from the lineal faith, was to him that "last feather" which is supposed to "break the camel's back." This marriage seems to have added but little to the happiness of the poet. Feuds arose between the boy-husband and his child-wife; and after the birth of two children, incompatibility of mind parted the lovers forever. Young, beautiful, and unprotected, stung, it is said, by the calumny of the world, and no doubt a prey to temporary delirium, the young wife threw herself into a pond, and met,

like poor Ophelia, "a muddy death." After this dreadful event Shelley is said to have been for some time deranged. It is generally supposed that he could not have had to reproach himself for contributing by his harshness or neglect to this fearful tragedy.

A chancery decree depriving the father of the guardianship of his children on the ground of his immorality and atheism was the superfluous drop in a cup already brimming with misery. Shelley's opinions upon marriage were notoriously erroneous; and although his practice was far better than his theory, - for not only was he lawfully married to both bis wives, but in the case of his first marriage the ceremony was twice performed, - still his most partial eulogists cannot altogether commend his disregard of a social tie which, however irksome, it would have been more to his credit to have respected. In a second and better-assorted marriage, with the talented daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the poet seems at last to have realized the love-dream of his youth. A short, sweet dream it was, ending too soon in that sleep that neither dreams nor loves.

In 1818 Shelley and his Mary left England for Italy, hoping that a milder climate might improve his health, for he had long been a martyr to intense physical suffering. It was in July, 1822, that the cruel waves of the bay of Spezia flung like senseless driftwood upon the sands all that mortality might claim of Shelley.

The poet was drowned on his homeward passage from Leghorn, whither he had gone to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy. The body, having lain in the water eight days, was so much decomposed as to render removal difficult; and accordingly it was reduced to ashes by fire. Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, Trelawney, and Captain Shenley, on the seashore watched mournfully beside the classic pyre, while

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